Schools get a budget for having an ALT. After the experimental native teacher school programs in the 70s and 80s, that’s how they incentivized schools to want to take JETs. It’s no big secret “gaijin dame” when applying to jobs.
Right now the schools and BOEs are just trying to save money on the ALTs, and keep as much for themselves.
With less children in the schools, governments in debt, and the economy stagnating in Japan, they basically are forced to find ways to cut the budget.
This post doesn’t get into why English teaching in Japan is so soul sucking. It’s not about why working in Japan is awful. It’s not meant to go into all that.
It’s just to explain why these dispatch companies can hire non-native speakers who sometimes even speak broken English, and get away with it.
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Because the BOEs don’t want to deal with the hassle of visas and hiring people themselves. If they don’t like an ALT they can tell the dispatch company and they’ll bring a new one in. If they’re direct hire, that’s a lot harder to do.
Take the job for a visa if you need it, then upskill and get out is my advice. There’s no hope for this industry
Well for the non-natives the salary is half decent. I feel more and more non-natives are coming in and the bar is set so low now whenever i go to an ALT meeting. I’ve been an ALT for around 15 years so have seen my fair share but when people are making simple spelling mistakes like ‘fourty’ then you have to kind of question why on earth dispatch companies are bringing in people like these. Ever since the yen hit the fan nobody wants to come to Japan and work here from abroad.
Right now? It’s been bad for quite a while now.
Fewer children*
Stringing a bunch of correlations together does not make a logical argument.
I’m making twice what I made in my country, so no complaints here.
Why?
>Right now the schools and BOEs are just trying to save money on the ALTs, and keep as much for themselves.
There’s your answer right there.
As the old saying goes, [if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. ](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/if_you_pay_peanuts,_you_get_monkeys)
The ALT system as a failure. It doesn’t teach students any better.
Most people coming to Japan to be an ALT have 0 experience teaching and have 0 knowledge about teaching.
Most ALTs are also unable to speak Japanese, which makes them as useful as a tape recorder.
But most of all, the whole English teaching (or better, English learning) system in Japan is not really designed to teach people English, at least not to a usable level.
Putting and end to the ALT system is the only way forward.
Most ALTs forget the A in ALT.
I used to be an ALT and now I am a regular JTE, and we have trainings on ‘how to work with ALTs’ and there are large sections of the training devoted to protecting ALTs egos.
Basically we are told that ALTs are to be used as support however we personally see fit, but it’s important to keep in mind that ALTs want to feel useful, so give them extra things to do such as repeating new vocabulary for students and grading sakbun and stuff.
Now I will say the textbook I used was pretty old, but generally speaking, that is what ALTs are for. 99% of ALTs have no training at all in how the Japanese education system works, how to write a test, the content of each textbook (when they first get here anyway) so ALTs are vastly limited in what they can do.
The system was a failure before it started because Japan basically thought ‘if there is a gaijin in the room, people’s English will improve…somehow!’
Nothing has changed. A lot of ALTs seem to think it is their job/mission to come here and ‘fix’ the Japanese education system.
It isn’t, you won’t, and no one wants you to try.
One thing the government HAS finally realized is that having a gaijin in the room doesn’t magically improve a student’s English….so they have shifted the focus on having a native speaker in the room to help students with English to, ‘having a person with 12 years of English education in the room to deepen students international understanding.’ Hence the huge increase in non-native ALTs, who also come from countries that pay significantly less that ALT salary. It’s a win for everyone except native speakers of English who want to come and live in Japan, not in poverty.
From the government’s point of view though, the non-native ALTs are happy, they don’t need to spend more tax on ALTs, they are still achieving the mission of ‘increasing international understanding’, and to be totally honest, Filipino ALTs are so much easier to work with than British/American ALTs, because they don’t have any delusions about what their responsibilities actually are.
Why the hate for non-native teachers? Some of the best I’ve worked with at universities here have been non-natives.
The yen has also sucked ever since the 90s
Can we just stop it with all the “non natives are not competent because they’re not native speakers” bullshit?
Yeah, it’s bullshit, because what actually matters is whether they know how to teach.
Mad a Filipino has a job you think you deserve because you’re white? Congrats, you’re a racist.
And before you attack my post, read a few books on English as a lingua franca, and note that some of the most prominent researchers in ESL are from countries like China, Germany, Austria, India.
And before you attack my post, note that I’m not saying all non natives are good at teaching – I’m saying that that blanket statements claiming that schools hiring non-natives is causing ESL to go downhill is bullshit. You need to qualify your statement and acknowledge that there are some competent non native teachers and merely being a native speaker isn’t a qualification.
i would think of it as supply and demand.
supply of native/experienced teachers > demand for these native/ experienced teachers
or another way to think of it
demand for a TEFL job in japan from English teachers > supply of such jobs in Japan
it’s one way to understand why China and the middle east pay so well in comparison.
>Schools get a budget for having an ALT. After the experimental native teacher school programs in the 70s and 80s, that’s how they incentivized schools to want to take JETs. It’s no big secret “gaijin dame” when applying to jobs.
>
>Right now the schools and BOEs are just trying to save money on the ALTs, and keep as much for themselves.
What exactly do you mean by this?
ALTs, if not JET, are generally paid out of the budget of a BoE. JETs receive government subsidies.
In that case just work hard and get a proper job. You westerners always take the easy way out by going to a foreign country and teaching English. Make an effort and see how the real world is, because people like you who go into ALT have never put any hard work into your lives.